Richard Foerster was born in 1949 in the Bronx, New York, the son of German immigrants, and holds degrees in English Literature from Fordham College and the University of Virginia. He is the author of six poetry collections: Sudden Harbor (1992) and Patterns of Descent (1993), published by Orchises Press; Trillium (1998), Double Going (2002), and The Burning of Troy (2006), published by BOA Editions; and Penetralia (2011), published by Texas Review Press. He has been the recipient of numerous honors, including the “Discovery”/The Nation Award, Poetry magazine’s Bess Hokin Prize, a Maine Arts Commission Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, and two National Endowment for the Arts poetry fellowships. Since the 1970s his work has appeared widely in magazines and anthologies, including The Best American Poetry, the Kenyon Review, TriQuarterly, The Gettysburg Review, Boulevard, The Southern Review, and Poetry. He has worked as a lexicographer, educational writer, typesetter, teacher, and as the editor of the literary magazines Chelsea and Chautauqua Literary Journal. For the last 26 years he has lived on the coast of Southern Maine.
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Richard Foerster Interview, with Mia Avramut
Richard Foerster, when did you first suspect you were a poet, and what did you do about it? How did your family react?
Between my wanting, as a high school student, to be a poet and my actually becoming one, there was a long apprenticeship. I was an English major at Fordham and the University of Virginia, sent out work to little magazines and garnered rejections while working as an editor in New York, revised and shredded, subscribed to various journals, joined the staff of Chelsea magazine and participated in the editorial process. I persisted.
A college professor of mine said I should never call myself a poet, that the title must be earned and bestowed by others. That was good advice for the long haul during years of a failing marriage and a seizure disorder, of perennial financial struggle after I decided to work as a freelance editor in order to have more free time to devote myself to poetry. When I was 35, I had a breakdown and was hospitalized for a short while. When I returned home to my empty house, I found a telegram waiting for me from Grace Schulman at the 92nd Street Y announcing that I’d won the “Discovery”/The Nation Award. That was in April 1985. It was around that time I also had my first acceptance from Poetry.
Regarding my family’s reaction to my aspirations—that’s a sore point. There has never been any encouragement; instead, a certainty that I am wasting my life on a mere “hobby,” one that will never provide me with a “decent retirement.” They may be right, but for me to have pursued what they would deem a suitable “career,” I would have had to forfeit a large chunk of my soul.
Walt Whitman “celebrated himself and sang himself.” Do you?
Though most of my poems draw on personal experience and often employ the first-person “I,” the self I celebrate and sing is an alternate me, a mythologized me, at times even a non-me. It is a projected voice, one amplified though the process of poem-making, a persona I use to explore various concerns that I can’t seem to resolve in any other way but through poetry. Rather than Whitman, I’d opt for Dickinson: I hope my “I” is “Representative.”
You have received numerous awards and honors over the years, including two National Endowment for the Arts grants and two Maine Literary Awards for Poetry. In your view, how does this kind of recognition change a poet’s work, voice, or expectations—if at all?
Such affirmation has its value in providing encouragement to continue striving in a genre that is largely irrelevant in the lives of most Americans. And sometimes the honor comes with a monetary award that helps pay bills. Balm for the spirit and balm for the flesh. An Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship allowed me to travel around the world for a year. As a result, new and wondrous images found their way into my poems; my vision broadened.
But what change beyond growth? There’s the danger of an inflated ego, of telling oneself, “I’ve arrived!” An artist who has arrived had better be preparing to set off on a new journey. For me, each honor has instilled a sense of responsibility to somehow extend my voice and craft as a poet.
What can be done, on this continent, to increase the relevance of poetry in people’s lives?
We’d need to change the very foundations of American popular culture, and that, I’m afraid, is not about to happen soon. There’s no denying that poetry can be found everywhere, in every guise and for every taste—and largely for free, there for the taking—this website being a perfect example. The problem is with perceived “value.” In America, I suspect there’s a small percentage of novelists and nonfiction writers who can earn a modest, enough-to-pay-the-rent income on book sales and subsidiary rights alone. How many poets? Two? (I’m thinking Mary Oliver and Billy Collins. Maybe Mark Doty.) Poetry for a long while now has had only a boutique audience, by whom it is no doubt held in high regard because their high school English teachers didn’t ruin the experience for them by testing it to death. But for the vast majority of Americans, poetry is absent from their daily lives, reserved for “special occasions” like weddings and funerals. In bookstores, have you noticed how poetry is always relegated to the back of the shop or to a bottom shelf? Even the purveyors don’t seem to hold it in high regard. It’s hard for me to imagine today’s emerging generation eagerly thumbing away at their iPhones to pull up poetry on their screens, though I’m sure there is somebody somewhere planning on marketing an online anthology of Tweet-size poems. What percentage of Nascar and NFL fans start their day with Poetry Daily or Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac? Gone are the days of the poetry superstars who would pack large auditoriums—Millay, Frost, Auden, Thomas, Ginsburg. And for those of us not of the brightest magnitude, there is the rare solace of the unexpected letter or email from a total stranger expressing how your poem touched her life. For most poets, that is compensation enough. So, to answer your question without sounding like a total pessimist: Poetry needs to be even more visible and compete better alongside popular culture. And I’m afraid that means somebody would have to make a profit off of it, or some wealthy patron with media savvy and vision would have to transform the very nature of our culture. Possible, but unlikely. Perhaps the status quo isn’t so bad after all.
Devoid of visual and form gimmicks, your poems have an enchanting precision and a distinct energy. A nearly alchemical quality of the language. Where do you write? Does this place (room, building or geographical area) inform your poetry? Paint of picture of it, in words.
Thank you, Mia. I like thinking of the language in my poems as being alchemical. And if there is precision, it comes from revising a poem repeatedly over long stretches of time to achieve a kind of layering—almost like the Japanese art of lacquering called urushi.
Where I write is less a place than a state of mind, a trancelike condition in which the conscious mind enters into an intimate dialogue with the subconscious. When I am working on a draft, the passage of time seems suspended; in actuality hours may go by. It is only after that dialogue ends that I become aware that I am hungry or that my foot is asleep because I have been sitting in one position too long.
But places? Over the span of forty years I’ve written at dozens of artist colonies around the world: Spain, France, Ireland, the Czech Republic, and many in the U.S. In Australia I had a family of Laughing Kookaburras roosting in a gum tree outside my window, sounding like a pack of howler monkeys. (Critics everywhere!) At Yaddo I had someone with Tourette’s Syndrome in the next room. The locales have always lent their terroir to the vintage.
Wildlife as critics! I like that. I can visualize that. And in Maine?
Right now, in Maine, I’m blessed with a 15 x 20 studio that’s separate from the main house. It sits on a slope beside a stream, opposite a small neglected, nineteenth-century graveyard and across the street from a quintessential Currier & Ives, white-spired New England church. Below is a narrow tidal river where herons, kingfishers, and the occasional bald eagle provide distractions. The walls are lined with volumes of poetry and dictionaries, paintings, photographs, broadsides. There’s the accumulated “stuff” of half a century of collecting: art glass and pottery, fossil stones, an Aboriginal ocher painting on eucalyptus bark from Arnhem Land, and a snake plant (my oldest possession) that’s bloomed only twice in sixty years. All these extensions of me disappear when I’m writing, though several of them have muscled their way into poems.
Multiple forms of life populate your poems. Lampropeltis triangulum (king snake, milk snake),Stenotomus chrysops (scup), and countless others. Your poetry prompts readers to reconsider their surroundings, to explore the rhythms and the intrinsic intelligence of Nature. I see your including the scientific names of creatures in your poems as an attempt to reconcile the rigor of science with the poetic reality of life forms.What is Nature, to you? Why do you find yourself drawn to aquatic life, to snakes and birds?
I grew up in the Bronx, where Nature was confined to parks or asserted itself through cracks in the pavement. I remember at age five or six seeing a tomato horn worm on a neighbor’s privet hedge; I remember the cloying scent of the privet blossoms. I remember seeing a Black and White Warbler in a flowering cherry tree on Easter Day in the Botanical Gardens when I was seven. It would be five decades before I’d spot another. I didn’t know the names of things then, but sought them out in the children’s section of the Mosholu Branch of the New York Public Library. The scientific names retained their mystery until I began studying Latin and Greek in high school. Once their etymologies become unlocked, they are like Imagist poems.
For me, Nature holds infinite fascination, not just for the beauty, but for the sublime, wherein resides terror—that “Other,” that unswerving “Principle,” which, if we call it “God,” surpasses understanding in its entirety, though we try repeatedly and fall short. That’s the wonderful challenge of contemplating Nature—the trying to make sense of it and locating ourselves within it or apart from it. The Romantics extolled its power and majesty, its bucolic bounty and seasonal patterns. Shelley steered his craft into the eye of the storm and perished in a blaze, like Semele.
But in its particulars, when under scrutiny, in an attempt to reconcile the rigorous facts of science with the poetic reality of symbol and metaphor, Nature, for me, becomes a portal to a spiritual realm. I hate to resort to the tired concepts of God and religion; they’ve simmered in the same pot for so long that they no longer provide sufficient nourishment. What’s been dished out to us too often is a comforting stew of doe-eyed Jesus spiced with hellfire. Nature allows me to delve into territories that organized religion has attempted to monopolize. There are mysteries and miracles enough in the natural world; if we’d but look deeply enough we may see that the supposed “kingdom of heaven” is literally “at hand”—but not without barbs.
Germany is dear to my heart and it’s where I am about to make my home. It was a delight to discover your Bavarian poem. What a feast of visual and gustatory memories, and figurative images! Do you have a specific (spiritual or familial) connection with Bavaria, or with another German Land?
My father was born in Bavaria in 1906; my mother, in Hamburg in 1908. They met and married in New York in the late 20s. When I was six, and again at eight, I was taken to Germany during the summer months to visit family there. My memories of those trips remain indelible. Hamburg at the time still bore the devastation of the fire bombings, and some of my aunts and uncles were living in quonset huts and the air raid bunkers that remained unscathed. It was my first awakening to the reality of war. In 1956 my uncle Paul still proudly displayed his Nazi military regalia on his apartment walls, and so the cultural stain of German history slowly began to imprint itself on my consciousness.
Bavaria was an entirely different experience since my father’s family came from a small farming community called Salz (Salt—Tacitus even refers to the place in his Histories), which lay outside a walled medieval town. For a Bronx boy, this was the ancient world. I saw the gravestones of my grandparents in a cemetery below the ruins of Salzburg Castle. The house where my father grew up bore the date 1666. For the first time I began to understand how culture can extend through generations.
“When I need to imagine / heaven, it is always / in reverse: an intaglio / incised on air...” I wonder about the genesis of “Münsterschwarzach.” In Bavaria, there is an ancient Benedictine abbey, Abtei Münsterschwarzach, with a fascinating and tortuous history. What inspired the poem and who is the boy?
Well, that boy was, is, me. In the summer of 1958, my parents took me to Münsterschwarzach to visit a cousin who was a monk there. Back home, all I’d ever seen of communal religious life was the outside of the convent where my parochial school nuns lived. Boys were never allowed inside. But here I was able to explore a self-sustaining Benedictine monastery complete with farm animals, fields and orchards among a vast complex of buildings arrayed around an imposing basilica. At the time I knew nothing of the stormy 1000-year history of the place. What I took away that day, quite simply, was a memory of the soup we were served in the guesthouse refectory—a perfect, flavorful broth, the taste of which I’ve never been able to replicate or savor anywhere else.
Not too long ago, a dinner guest complimented a soup I’d made by saying, “This is heavenly.” So it was a cliché that propelled me back to that emblematic bowl which was placed before me fifty-five years ago, in which I saw, and still see, my face reflected. In crafting the poem around the metaphor of an intaglio, the challenge was to “re-collect” the past and transform a mere personal memory into something that might resonate with meaning for others.
Have you ever been infected with Wanderlust, or Fernweh? (I prefer the latter, it better suits the longing.)
I have a poem, “Three Afterdinner Tales,” at the end of my second book. The speaker is a Prufrock-type who’s never traveled; rather, he lives vicariously through the travel tales of others and, when it’s his turn, dredges up a dreamscape from adolescence. At one point he states, “What defines us, after all, / is travel, all those queasy voyages and wobbly- / kneed arrivals down the plank of logic, / the hubbub of customs, the overstuffed luggage / we haul from port to port, the way we negotiate / narrow scented streets into the unfamiliar heart / where our tongues are hobbled by phrasebooks.” Another, written at Hawthornden Castle in Scotland, begins a bit ingenuously, “I’ve always dreaded this kind of dislocation—the body / popped from its socket, the mind unhoused into the ex- / ile of travel, comfort reduced to the solid gray / dimension of an American Tourister. And yet . . .” And in “Kata Tjuta” I liken the Aborigines in their seasonal treks to Aeneas setting out from Troy with Anchises on his shoulders and all the remnants of their life there in tow—destination unknown—the wandering itself becoming the stuff of myth.
So, yes, I’ve known Wanderlust and felt the itch of Fernweh. I have always believed that travel defines us, is essential to soul-making—whether it is physical through space and time, or through books, or even stamp-collecting, whether it is an individual on a journey or a whole people on the move. Of course there is tragedy in exile, but also the possibility for growth and renewal. I would posit that the expulsion from the Garden of Eden was less a curse than a blessing. Negotiating dislocation has allowed us to evolve not just as a species but as developers of language and culture.
“Faithless / apostle, I hovered in quasi-sleep / around that point of light, the pulsing / tidal flow...” (“Vigil” from The Burning of Troy). Is there anything, on Earth or elsewhere, that you hold sacred?
The night my partner died of lung cancer, as I sat bedside and listened to his breathing become shallower and shallower, I fell asleep. It was like the garden at Gethsemane, and I’d failed the test.
I believe the body is sacred, as is its passage into death. The Earth is sacred. Certain principles are sacred, such as “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” and “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” Institutions, no. Supposed sacred texts, no.
Of course, alongside the sacred, stands the profane, adding delightful complications to what is sacred.
Your most recent collections, “The Burning of Troy” (2006) and “Penetralia” (2011), both unforgettable reads, deal with spiritual crises, illness, abandonment, and death, in unique ways that transcend the personal experience. “On entering this crypt of imagination / the mind's entombed a moment / in an airless afterlife any pharaoh / might have envied” (“Bodies: The Exhibition” from “Penetralia”). The poems seamlessly blend historical or mythical suggestions, and contemporary symbolic landscapes. What would you write now, that you have not written before, about mortality and the afterlife?
My friend Thom Ward, perhaps quoting someone else, says poets are obsessed with two things: death and commas. I certainly was focused on mortality in the last two books and struggling to define some sort of “afterlife” to grief. Within the span of six years I had two partners succumb to cancer. For one, I was the principle caregiver; with the other, I was excluded and had to endure from a distance. Each book, I hope, conveys a different perspective on dealing with death. Anger toward mortality is more evident in Penetralia, though the last section provides a fierce argument for the power of language and myth to sustain us.
As to what more I would write now on mortality and the afterlife? I seriously don’t have a clue. My mother turns 104 this year; my sisters are in their late 70s and 80s; I suspect I’ll have a few more years to contemplate the subjects and add a new spin or two.
When I first read Foerster, I reacted the same way I did when I discovered Trakl and Huchel: with a sort of reverent frenzy. I’m thrilled we’re contemporaries! Do you favor a particular German poet or literary current?
You flatter me too much, Mia. Now I have to admit my ignorance: I never learned German. My parents never spoke it at home by the time I was born after World War II. In school I studied Latin, Greek, and French, and so my poetic affiliations lie mostly there. In college, there was very little poetry offered in translation. If there was a World Lit. course, it escaped my radar.
I’ve always enjoyed Rilke, especially his shorter pieces. My poem “At Forty” was influenced, perhaps too much, by his “Panther,” and “Archaic Figure of Apollo” informs my poem “Life Drawing,” which Archie Ammons selected for The Best American Poetry. I’ve also read Trakl and admire the lapidary, dreamlike imagery of his poems, but I can’t say he ever served as a model or influence. A flaw in my education there. And I confess I knew nothing of Peter Huchel, but looking online I found this in translation by Michael Hamburger: “Let us go down / in the language of angels / to the broken bricks of Babel.” I’m certainly going to seek out more of his work. Thank you.
You mention your affinity for French language and culture. Do you have a preferred French author, or group of poets?
I can read the language (with the help of a dictionary at my side) and have had a handful of my poems translated into French. I worked with the translator to overcome the roadblocks he encountered involving double-edged words, to carry over the etymological underpinnings of certain words, and to convey the music of the English effectively into French, and so I’m well aware of the challenges facing translators. So when I read my favorite French poets—Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Apollinaire—it’s usually in bilingual editions, going back and forth, slowly, from the English to the French, reading aloud to hear the music.
Among contemporaries, I very much admire the prose poems of Jean-Michel Maulpoix (though I myself never write prose poetry). A few years back, I typeset a bilingual edition of Une histoire de bleu, and in the process helped fine-tune a few of the English translations. The time spent in such close reading was like undergoing a long, sensuous massage. It’s a beautiful, lyrical book, a long associative meditation on the color blue.
After finishing “Penetralia”, I found myself seeking more. I suspect this is the case for all your readers. Please tell us about your work-in-progress.
I have a dozen or so poems in a new folder tentatively titled River Road, the name of the street where I now live with my partner, the artist Douglas Taylor. His presence in my life emerges in the last two poems of Penetralia, set in the quasi-afterlife of domestic happiness. I’m using that as a jumping-off point for a new book, but how does one write engagingly about being happily in love? Though that’s what I’ve set out to do, I’ve found instead that each new poem insists on straying into dark territory. For example, Doug and I were happily vacationing in Key West when we learned of the assassination attempt on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and saw Jared Lee Loughner’s moon-skull face on the TV newscast. I was reminded that day that happiness is brittle because it is static and must be measured against the dislocations of chance. So a poem like “Route 1, Mile 0,” that began in its early drafts as a Stevensian kind of Key West poem, morphed through various revisions until the carefree voice of the tourist/voyeur became “rum-punched” and that of a crazed killer.
Judging by my past practice, I suspect the direction of any new book will be influenced by events in my life, and thus at the mercy of the unknown. I work poem by poem, then arrange them like tiles into a mosaic—the small particulars contributing to a new, larger whole.
I will always remember your words, and welcome the dislocations of chance. If you were to give one additional, essential piece of advice to beginning poets, you would say...
. . . read widely, react, write, revise. Repeat as necessary. Treat rejection and acceptance equally. Leave your ego in the back seat even though it’s constantly nagging about your driving and insisting on where else you both should be headed.
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Münsterschwarzach
Bavaria
When I need to imagine
heaven, it is always
in reverse: an intaglio
incised on air, its impression
gusting from some otherwhere
bitten in an acid wash
of memory—
a boy, say,
bent over a bowl of broth,
a face reflected there
freckled with parsley, and all
else in that sacred immensity:
the bare-walled refectory,
the dour Benedictines, a cousin
cowled in graces, Gott im Himmel,
words like flesh—
smudged away
by time but for that bone-white
plate I drift upon. The illusion
pools at my lips: each vapory
green oasis I sip and savor
though it burns the tongue.
The Solitary
At the water’s edge a brindled koi loiters
vagrant and alone. All day I’ve watched it
circle this man-made pond, how its barbels probe
a barren floor. Some thoughtless soul freed it
here, beyond chance of progeny: black schist
blotched with white, yet in the briefest shudder
of its fins, thin veins of gold dart, like flecks
in an iris that rivet attention to the eye’s dark core.
I look, and the koi now floats through a world storied
with overarching leaves: oaks and aspens quaking
in a sky that rewrites unceasingly what any smudge
of wind erases. I’ve drifted for years through such waters,
allowed a weight to settle like an arthritic’s hand
crimping across the fabric of a page, stitch
and unstitch imperfect threads. Yet sometimes
the simplest melody can rimple undetected
just beneath the surface. Sometimes, in our loneliest
hunger, the koi must seem to caress the sand.
Route 1, Mile 0
Rum-punched, I sashayed
the length of Duval, amid vacationers
in lazy parade, palm-fronded
in shirts from Fast Buck Freddie’s.
What is it about the allure of extremes
that brings them such places: Southernmost
Point, Mile Zero, the sea-snipped end
of a thread fraying into hazy vistas?
In the ambrosial, amnesiac air
of America, don’t you love how myth
can mirage such thin horizons? Brighter
than blood, the bougainvilleas spill
around the marker where they pose
while pelicans circle overhead like drones,
taking the measure of every errant shimmer.
So many disposable cameras snap and whir.
For now, I am nowhere but here, yet another
place, loaded, awaiting my perfect photo op,
practicing the vacant, inscrutable smile
that will haunt this evening’s news.
Apparition
Lampropeltis triangulum
Such hued cacophony: coral,
king, or milk? Old mnemonics
fail: “red on black / friend
to Jack, / red on yellow / dangerous
fellow,” (but then the mind unspools
“black on red / you’ll be dead”).
Yet here he lolls in an equinox
of sun and shade, new risen
from a brittle crust of long sleep,
tasting the crisp air, onyx-
eyed, like a starless sky
under which we’d stand immobilized.
Were I to call you, come and look,
the shudder passing through
the ground, the shadow of your drawing
near, nothing would remain but a few
words between us, the slough
and void of fearful wonder.
A Shoal
Stenotomus chrysops
At the river’s mouth, a shoreward surge
of porgies spilled from the surf
where the tide roiled with bluefish
and harbor seals schooled in ferocities
of hunger. They slashed the mercuric
flanks of their prey till the air blazed
like shattered mirrors under the angling
sun. We stood on the rocks awhile, safe
in our astonishment, and watched
the sea contuse with the blood of thousands.
Soon there was nothing more to keep us
from the darkened path toward home,
except for the brief flash of the headland within
its gathering sweep, its blind, imperious gaze.